


Bad Things Happen

by Necroplantser



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Cave-In, Chronic Illness, Chronic Pain, Delusions, Epilepsy, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Headcanon, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Loss of Limbs, M/M, Multi, Other People’s Headcanons, Seizures
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-28 01:43:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15697590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Necroplantser/pseuds/Necroplantser
Summary: With the occasional side of fluff. Fills for the Bad Things Happen Bingo on tumblr. Mind the tags.





	1. Chronic Pain (Laurence/Gehrman)

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact about Heli: he LOVES projecting his own experiences onto fictional characters.
> 
> This includes his chronic pain.
> 
> Enjoy.

It never fails to escape Gehrman’s notice, the way Laurence’s hand slips up his shirt, rubs firmly at his sternum, or his collarbone, or twists uncomfortably to reach a spot on his back. When he comes out of a lecture with his joints crackling like an old man. Jerks his upper body to crack his backbone, then clutch at his chest like the pressure’s moved. How he’d had a month-long phase of just rubbing his jaw, the bone and the hinge, til his skin broke out in the pattern of his fingers.

It’s in the first few months of their second-to-last year at Byrgenwerth together that Gehrman finally  _ gets _ it, sort of, when he’s walking again and still fooled by a cramp in an ankle that isn’t even there. But students don’t mutter amongst themselves as much about phantom pains. It’s a little more obvious what the problem is.

They both have days where they just do not come into class, or when Gehrman stumbles in late because he hasn’t yet figured out the delicate balance of his life now (too much weight put on his right side, he hasn’t learned to be gentle with it) or Laurence slips into the back of the hall, high as a kite, still rubbing at his face and the sides of his head like he does.

Laurence slips into Gehrman’s room some nights and moans into his chest, pushes Gehrman’s knuckles harder into the tender spots he lays them across. Buries his face in the cool side of the pillow.

“It never stops,” he mumbles. He stops their lovemaking right in the middle and Gehrman has to swear up and down that it’s alright before Laurence will believe him, mouth hovering over one of the dark discolorations on his hip just seconds before. “It never stops, you only learn how to cope.”

“I know. How bad is it right now?”

“How do I explain it?”

“Would a lesser man cry?”

Another night they go to bed together. They sit outside, far enough from the school that they can have privacy but close enough to not be stranded if a blizzard hits, and the bare trees shake with the promise that it will. Laurence has buttoned himself into Gehrman’s jacket while he’s wearing it. To his own word he is feeling no pain, nothing but joy, and while Gehrman worries Laurence assures him everything is fine and will continue to be fine, so Gehrman takes him to bed knowing well that Laurence cannot be trusted to make it to his own room, or stay there.

Neither of them sleep until the sun is rising and Laurence finally knocks out. Gehrman puts his shirt back on and follows suit soon after, half-covering Laurence’s body with his.

“I know I expected you to be shirtless,” Laurence says that next morning, recounting over breakfast. “But then again I cannot be expected to remember things from last night. Or to not have licked your nipple. I know I did that.”

Gehrman stifles a shocked bark of laughter with a turnover and ends up choking on it.


	2. Anger Born of Worry (Gehrman/Maria)

When the ground finally stops shifting, and the dust settles, Maria raises her head and takes in her surroundings — everyone before her in one piece, if a bit shaken. Satisfied, she turns around, and stops suddenly once her peripherals land on a wall that had not been there before the earthquake.

Rubble, and nothing but. Maria doesn’t stop to look for signs of the worst.

While Henriett and Izzy set off to find another way back, because there is always one in these dungeons, always, right? Especially this deep! Maria searches for a gap in the wall, something, anything she can get a sound through. Her heart pulls at itself at the very thought of... But the blockage is solid, it seems, and her cries do not reach the other side. 

Something else reaches her and hers, and Ludwig hears it first, reacts first. Bestial shrieks, too humane to come from a true monster but just wild enough to make one doubt the humanity behind it.

Hunters transforming into beasts was nothing strange now. An unfortunate reality, if anything, but the noise is familiar to Maria in a different way. 

Soon both she and Ludwig fall into a panic, banging at the rock, trying to move pieces and keep the danger from that to a minimum while at the same time hardly caring.

“Gehrman?! Vitus?!” Maria shouts. “Gratia!” 

The screaming gets louder, louder.

“What’s happening?!”

They both know.

“Is that…”

“That’s not an echo,” Ludwig says, answering the question Maria is suddenly grateful to not have asked.

“They will be fine, I’m sure,” she tries to convince herself. 

He catches on, his wide eyes darken, his stance shifts with agitation. “We’ve never had two.”

“They will be  _ fine! _ ” Maria reasserts. “Do you not trust that they can take care of themselves?”

One scream is silenced and there’s a rapid flurry of thuds against the rubble.

“See?”

“Maria, that could mean  _ anything. _ Just because it’s quiet does not mean it’s  _ dead. _ And anyway, there’s still the second one!”

Her response has no time to leave her mouth when they’re rejoined by a more frantic group.

Breathless, hunched, clutching at both knees with sharp fingers, Izzy takes a moment to recover before looking up at the two hunters, pupils like pinpricks. “We need to leave. We need to leave,  _ right now. _ ”

“Where’s Gehrman—?”

“I said  _ right-goddamn-now! _ ” The tiny hunter, seeming to be on the verge of collapsing, is scooped up into Gratia’s arms as they make their escape. 

In fear of losing hope, Maria does not look back.

Gehrman rejoins them halfway back to Byrgenwerth, silent and unnoticed until Maria happens across him in an empty corridor.

“You—!”

He gives her a wry smile. “Good evening, Maria.”

She stutters. “How did you— I thought you were— no one would—“

“That Pthumerian had us cornered, I…”

“You  _ nothing, _ shut up for a second and let me… AUGH!” Maria snarls, pacing back and forth with all the energy she should not have. “I thought you were  _ dead,  _ do you understand?”

Gehrman raises his hand to interrupt, to explain himself. “We had it under control! The body it was carrying, it was… plagued, or something, and it hit Izzy, I had to send them back—“

“And you did not think to tell them to tell us what happened?”

“I thought you might trust me enough as your leader to survive in one-on-one combat!”

Maria seethes, silent, and makes a move to walk away before abruptly turning around.

“Please, just… just don’t scare me like that again.”


	3. Nightmare (Laurence/Gehrman)

The cathedral is ablaze when Gehrman arrives. Some of the little messengers grab at the hem of his pants to get his attention as his body materializes at the lantern, making their throaty little noises and trying to get him to turn back, but he brushes them off and confirms what he already knows — the fire will not hurt him. It consumes, but does not kill.

A shame. Flora still has sway over him in the Nightmares and will not let Kos have him. The dead Great One’s curse almost seems preferable to the only-vague freedom allowed by the Moon Presence, despite whatever affection she gave him.

Through the flames and equally so a part of them, the beast that was once Laurence lies draped over a statue, one arm dangling at his side, deep in slumber that Gehrman does not dare to wake him from.

He’s known for a while that there is no more hope left, for either of them.

A hunter hunts beasts, and on occasion, other hunters. That night, Gehrman sheds that mantle for the sake of his love and his own sanity — he could kill Laurence here but he is bound to the Nightmare like Gehrman is bound to the Dream, he would come right back, with all the memory of it. 

So he sits on his knees before the altar and grasps one of Laurence’s claws in both hands. It seems like such a short time ago that the opposite could be, that he could fit both of Laurence’s hands into the grip of one of his own, there had never been a grown man in Yharnam who barely cleared a meter and two-thirds. Like his body now, it had all been sickness to blame, but Gehrman finds himself wondering how this, at least, could have been avoided. How it could be fixed.

He tightens his hold and presses his face against the back of Laurence’s hand. For once, it’s not inappropriately cold — there’s a pleasant warmth there now that used to only exist in Laurence outside his extremities.

In the corner of his vision Gehrman notices a faint trail of smoke — no, steam. He lifts his head to see fire re-engulf small spots that had been brought down to embers just seconds ago. Hurriedly, as if with the fear that he’ll be noticed, Gehrman wipes at the tear tracks that had dried so fast with the end of his sleeve.

Jaw clenched and throat closed against a sob, Gehrman leaves Laurence to his nightmare, disappearing to mist as he turns back to the lantern.


	4. Overdose (Izzy/Archibald)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blood: how the hell does that work?

“That’s  _ it, _ you hear me? I’m taking you back home—“

There is nothing alive in the immediate area —  _ nothing. _ The city square, flooded with the blood, entrails and corpses of beasts in varying states of transformation from sharp-toothed long-bearded humans to unrecognizable scourge beasts, meets dawn bereft of life save for two hunters on their knees.

The shorter of the two grabs her trembling companion by the shoulders, shakes him, yanks down his mask and puts up her goggles. Such a clear distinction between bright red blood-soaked everything and the lower half of his face perfectly clean excepting the visible hypersalivation brings her brows to a point. He’s all giggles. She’s seen him all giggles before.

“Archie.”

“Mm-hm?”

“We’re going home.” Gritting her teeth, Izzy stands and hooks her arms under Archibald’s. “Get up, before there’s no hot water left to shower with.” The manic laughter stops so abruptly. She watches his bottom lip twitch, then his fingers, subtle and then violent, looking almost like gloved claws. 

Not good. 

Something soft strikes a pang in her heart, but Izzy can not afford to be gentle now. She is no stranger to the bloodlust, tempered by exposure and sheer force of will, but her own resistance in the face of so much gore is an anomaly among hunters — and, she notes grimly in the sweet scent that grows ever the more enticing, is weakening the longer they stay.

She stoops down again and lifts up Archibald’s goggles, looking him straight in the unfocused eyes, and gives another heave to try and make him stand. “You want to be here when they come to clean it up?” she hisses. Her own tone stings her, but there is no time to be considerate or sweet. “You want to be the one to explain the abso-fucking-lutely  _ unnecessary _ level of  _ disaster _ you made here? We can leave! No one’s gonna ask us if we’re gone!”

She watches Archibald pause, look away, breathe, hiccup, wrench an arm away to cover his mouth. He pulls himself up to standing with her leverage. For a moment a surge of pride rises in Izzy’s chest, but it shatters when she sees just the smallest bit of pink between his fingers.

“No— _ no! _ ” she shouts. She can’t help it, she grabs his wrist with almost enough force to break. “You’ve lost your blood privileges!”

It’s like he’s vibrating, trying to form words but they won’t come out, but there’s fear in his eyes that she can plainly see, like a cornered animal. She doesn’t let go of his hands, no matter how hard he pulls back. Hard enough to get the gloves off if she wasn’t holding on so tightly.

“We. Are. Going.  _ Home. _ ”

“I know. I know.”

“Then let’s go.” Izzy starts walking, backwards, both eyes trained on Archibald when his resolve to stay in that spot falters and he stumbles after her. “C’mon, everyone’s going to be worried.” No, they won’t. They are two capable hunters. “They’ll send out a search party.” Except search parties aren’t sent out for normal hunts, if there are bodies to be found they are found in the morning. Izzy knows that. Archibald knows that. But, she rationalizes, he is too far out of his mind to remember. “You’ll make Gratia cry if she thinks you’re dead.” That much was true. “Do you want to be the one to make Gratia cry?”

The horror on his face is enough for Izzy to crack a smile behind her mask. It fades when she notices tears starting to bead up in the corners of his eyes. “Except she won’t, since you’re not dead! Oh, don’t  _ you _ cry…” 

The height that he has on her makes reaching up to touch his cheek a little difficult, but she manages it without having to strain her sore arm. “Let’s go get cleaned up, alright?”

“Alright.”


	5. Seizures (Micolash)

It’s a rapid transition of shadow above him, the leaves rustling over his head beneath the midday sun and flickering in the patterns that they block it, that sets him off this time.

A weight under which he sways — reality slips from his tenuous grasp. Briefly, lights flicker before his eyes and all goes dark, screaming inside of his brain, silent.

Damian tells him that there is something very wrong with him. And maybe Damian is right. To Micolash, however right Damian may be, he’s only coming closer to enlightenment. Were these not the same symptoms their former classmate Romilda had exhibited before her ascension? 

He passes out in the streets of Yahar’gul and awakens in his bedroom, bruised, his head pounding and his mouth dry. Blood had dried on his upper lip, smeared and hurriedly wiped away and it hadn’t been by him.

But that time he swore he’d seen a god.


End file.
